Speaker 1: A zone media hell, and welcome to this week's better
Speaker 1: offline monologue. I'm your host ed Zetron. What last Sunday
Speaker 1: was the Super Bowl, the final game of the NFL season,
Speaker 1: And for those of you who don't like sport or
Speaker 1: live in another country or something, it's an event that
Speaker 1: many people just watch for the many, many ads that
Speaker 1: they cut into during the game. The Super Bowl ad
Speaker 1: can cost as much as eight million dollars for a
Speaker 1: thirty second commercial, depending on where it air is during
Speaker 1: the game, the most coveted slots being just before the
Speaker 1: halftime show, and the ads themselves tend to be the spectacular,
Speaker 1: highly produced fare. They're very weird, but they put a
Speaker 1: ton of money into them. This year, I was specifically
Speaker 1: excited to see what bullshit slot the various AI companies
Speaker 1: would try and force down my nasty little throat. Last year,
Speaker 1: anthropicaird a five second long commercial that said, and I
Speaker 1: quote Claude is a next generation AI system, a sentence that,
Speaker 1: when you think about it, means precisely nothing. And Microsoft
Speaker 1: famously aired a co pilot AI commercial where several of
Speaker 1: the prompts, such as write code for my three D
Speaker 1: open World game simply didn't do what they said they did.
Speaker 1: In the case of the Open World game by the way,
Speaker 1: from last year, it generated a step by step guide
Speaker 1: to building one, which isn't the same thing at all.
Speaker 1: It's kind of like ordering dinner and Uber EAT's bringing
Speaker 1: your recipe for a burrito instead of an actual burrito,
Speaker 1: but still charging you all the same. Nevertheless, this year's
Speaker 1: slot was even more obscene, starting with an ad for
Speaker 1: Google's Pixel nine phone where a guy has asked questions
Speaker 1: as if he's taking a job interview by Google's generative
Speaker 1: AI Gemini Live. As he answers them, it's obvious that
Speaker 1: what he's describing is actually being a father. They also
Speaker 1: show you an overlay of like him taking his kid
Speaker 1: to score. It's got emotional music playing with him taking
Speaker 1: her to school, and at one point e Google's explain
Speaker 1: bling to a child, which I should be clear is
Speaker 1: not a Gemini product, it's just Google Search. It's unclear
Speaker 1: what this ad is actually advertising. We don't hear the
Speaker 1: prompt that's started these questions, nor do we know why
Speaker 1: he's answering them, but when he's done, he's clearly joining
Speaker 1: some sort of job interview. Virtually Gemini doesn't really respond
Speaker 1: to any of his answers other than to say things like,
Speaker 1: try rephrasing your answer to sound more confident, so we
Speaker 1: can assume. And that's all we're doing here that he's
Speaker 1: preparing for a job interview. He's also pretty old, like
Speaker 1: his kid has gone off the college. She's a full
Speaker 1: grown adult. Now. Very weird, very weird commercial, very clearly
Speaker 1: built for people who cry whenever they remember their parents. Sorry,
Speaker 1: if that's you you are, do not use Gemini Life.
Speaker 1: That's my recommendation. Next up was open a Eyes gratuitously
Speaker 1: stupid commercial called The Intelligence Age, which showed a dot
Speaker 1: matrix history of time involving men throwing spears, people riding horses,
Speaker 1: waves crashing a waving skeleton for some reason as a plane,
Speaker 1: and eventually a globe with a few dots going toward
Speaker 1: a computer with a modem sound playing. A full forty
Speaker 1: seconds in to this one minute long commercial, we start
Speaker 1: actually hearing prompts. Someone says, summarize this article for me,
Speaker 1: Then someone else says, help me practice asking for a raise.
Speaker 1: And this prompt, by the way, is near impossible to hear,
Speaker 1: as it's cut off to have a guy say act
Speaker 1: as my sleep coach. And then there's two more prompts
Speaker 1: in a language I don't speak, then another that says
Speaker 1: turn my idea into a business plan, before a chirpy
Speaker 1: voice asks what do you want to create next? This
Speaker 1: is really good. I love this. I also love the
Speaker 1: idea of having two prompts in different languages, because people
Speaker 1: speak different languages other than English. I understand that there
Speaker 1: is no official language of America, so it's good. But nevertheless,
Speaker 1: that you only got a few seconds. You didn't think
Speaker 1: to try and get as many prompts in. Maybe it's
Speaker 1: that they didn't have them. In fact, if you're a
Speaker 1: listener and you watch this commercial and you speak those languages,
Speaker 1: please email me. It's easy at better offline dot com.
Speaker 1: I would love to hear what they actually said. Nevertheless,
Speaker 1: asking chat GPT to be your sleep coach leads it
Speaker 1: to ask you about your sleep habits, your lifestyle, common issue,
Speaker 1: sleep quality, and your ideal goals. Asking it to turn
Speaker 1: my idea into a business plan immediately led it to
Speaker 1: asking me what my idea was. Great. I can practice
Speaker 1: with a large language model how to ask for a raise,
Speaker 1: But what does that mean exactly? What does this product,
Speaker 1: do what is chat GPT and assuming that AI ends
Speaker 1: up actually wrecking the labor market as they wanted to,
Speaker 1: the idea of using chat GPT is a soundboard when
Speaker 1: you renegotiate your contract kind of feels like more of
Speaker 1: a cruel joke. It's also not going to do that.
Speaker 1: But anyway, two fucking years into this nonsense and these
Speaker 1: assholes can't even come up with one interesting or useful example.
Speaker 1: It's a fucking joke. These people have such contempt for
Speaker 1: customers that they can barely be bothered to advertise their
Speaker 1: products also goddamn half hearted. Yet the worst one by
Speaker 1: far was Salesforce and their Gait Expectations ad, where Matthew McConaughey,
Speaker 1: an actor, says that he and I quote didn't use
Speaker 1: Agent Force, the powerful AI from Salesforce, so an AI
Speaker 1: agent didn't send him the fastest to his gait or
Speaker 1: root of your British which has now changed. The commercial
Speaker 1: ends by saying that Salesforce helps London Heathrow create a
Speaker 1: first class experience. Everyone in the commercial was also American act. Nevertheless,
Speaker 1: I n actually went and looked up what this integration
Speaker 1: actually looked like and discovered that Heathrow actually integrated Einstein's chatbots,
Speaker 1: Einstein being Salesforce's large language model chatbot thing. They've been
Speaker 1: warming up for that a decade, but this was back
Speaker 1: in May twenty twenty three. They claimed that Einstein answered
Speaker 1: more than four thousand questions a month and helped cut
Speaker 1: call service volumes by twenty seven percent, and that Heathrow
Speaker 1: has seen a four hundred and fifty percent increase in
Speaker 1: live chat usage since launch. Then they proudly added that today,
Speaker 1: and the article is completely undated, Heathrow had seen about
Speaker 1: around forty to sixty second quicker per contact interactions in
Speaker 1: call centers with Einstein chatbots. This is the only data
Speaker 1: that appears to exist for anything to do with Agent
Speaker 1: Force and Heathrow. There's nothing else they could find. I
Speaker 1: will add that a record breaking eighty three point nine
Speaker 1: million passengers flew through Heathrow in twenty twenty four four
Speaker 1: thousand questions a month or forty eight thousand a year.
Speaker 1: It's kind of a drop in the buck in as
Speaker 1: a percentage at zero point zero five seven two percent,
Speaker 1: And like I said, really not finding any information about
Speaker 1: their Agent Force integration. All I could find was a
Speaker 1: LinkedIn post from Sharon Pryor, who is the director of
Speaker 1: Technology at Heathrow, who said that four hundred percent more
Speaker 1: questions were handled via live chat, which is interesting because
Speaker 1: the one from twenty twenty three it seems four hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty percent. I guess that went down. And apparently
Speaker 1: Agent Force says something called instant FAQs and interminal wayfinding
Speaker 1: for your gate plus restaurant shops and facilities. I want
Speaker 1: to be clear that all this bullshit was doable with
Speaker 1: knowledge management systems and chatbots all the way back in
Speaker 1: the mid twenty tens. Salesforce isn't even describing a AI agents,
Speaker 1: which are supposedly autonomous chatbots. They're describing this boring, bob
Speaker 1: standard bullshit. We can help you find your gate, stuff
Speaker 1: that apps have done for a decade. What's more insulting
Speaker 1: is the commercial officscates what this product actually is. Macarache
Speaker 1: as a traveler is saying he didn't use Agent Force,
Speaker 1: which is the powerful AI from Salesforce, as if that
Speaker 1: is something a consumer chooses to do versus a business
Speaker 1: being actively conned by Mark Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce.
Speaker 1: Salesforce has no powerful AI. It's all a lie, a
Speaker 1: con an attempt to pretend that a company does something
Speaker 1: that they do not do. Salesforce has a large language
Speaker 1: bottel they're working on. They've used chat GBT or GBT
Speaker 1: four in the past. Nevertheless, I don't know what the
Speaker 1: powerful AI is. Salesforce, well, their problem is simple. They
Speaker 1: can't do an AD that says, hey, do you want
Speaker 1: a slightly more powerful chatbot that costs a great deal
Speaker 1: of money, So they have to make this kind of
Speaker 1: incongruent AD that lies about their product without ever really
Speaker 1: saying what it does. Open AI, two years into this bubble,
Speaker 1: still can't muster up a single meaningful, interesting use case.
Speaker 1: And in both Google and AI's case, it truly isn't
Speaker 1: obvious what the product is that they're selling. And that
Speaker 1: really is the ultimate summary of the AI boos. Vague
Speaker 1: and blatant lies that barely masked the contempt that these
Speaker 1: companies have for customers, so much content that they can't
Speaker 1: even bother to give them a real reason to use it,
Speaker 1: And if a monest I'm a little bit disappointed about
Speaker 1: these commercials because they lacked even the juice of the
Speaker 1: twenty twenty two Crypto Bacanalia. You see there, we had
Speaker 1: celebrities that called you a pig and a moron. They
Speaker 1: said you were a hog that rolled around in the
Speaker 1: mud and you oinked and squealed instead of putting everything
Speaker 1: you had behind Crypto and people like Tom Brady while
Speaker 1: they delivered, or at least on a superficial level, these
Speaker 1: compelling ish messages that suggested you might really need to
Speaker 1: and successfully convince people to buy these nebulous tokens in NFTs,
Speaker 1: even though many of the companies they promoted turned out
Speaker 1: to be elaborate Ponzi schemes such as FDx. And never
Speaker 1: have I been more certain that this bubble will pop.
Speaker 1: This was the biggest stage that generative AI will ever have,
Speaker 1: and they blew it because well, deep down, they realized
Speaker 1: there's just not that much to sell.